The Floors of Memory
by llethe
Summary: You crash.  You burn.  You will not be able to say that you hadn't sensed the oncoming storm when you were chasing it.


Disclaimer: I don't own the _Bourne _trilogy. The title is from T.S. Eliot's "Rhapsody on a Windy Night."

Summary: You crash. You burn. You will not be able to say that you hadn't sensed the oncoming storm when you were chasing it.

Rating: PG-13  
><span>Warning<span>: Second-person, language.  
><span>Characters<span>: Bourne  
><span>Spoilers<span>: All of it.

Author's Note: I wrote this a series of drabbles in September-October 2007 as a way to get a better grip on Bourne's character after _Ultimatum._ It's my first and only second-person story; it happened to write itself that way.

**The Floors of Memory  
>by llethe<strong>

_And through the spaces of the dark  
>Midnight shakes the memory<br>As a madman shakes a dead geranium._

"Rhapsody on a Windy Night," T.S. Eliot

1.

You remember when you thought you'd never smile again. For two years and more, you thought that, entirely. Felt that, entirely. You wanted to die because it was the best way, the logical way, the only God damned way.

You remember when your hands were the only part of your body you were free to move. You remember when all they could do was retaliate against pain by shaking, squeezing into themselves. You remember then.

You remember why you said "yes."

2.

After the first kill, it becomes easier. Unvoiced questions and second thoughts that first lingered in the back of your mind, forgotten for the most part but there at the most inconvenient times, eventually disappear. After the first kill, you're in too deep to get out. You're already afraid of the mirror and the face reflected in it.

And then it's just your job. You can smile and laugh, talk and joke, make people like you and never do you think, "They have no idea." You don't think about the job during these times. When a job comes in, it's a race to disengage, to stop laughing and stop smiling and stop pretending to be a real human without drawing undue attention. Once the job comes in, you can't do any of those things. Mentally, you can't. Physically, you can't.

It becomes less and less easy.

3.

There are people who need to die. There are people who need to die so that others won't.

Neski was the target. Neski was the one who needed to die. Neski's wife was the part of the job that made you a murderer. She wasn't your first. She wasn't your last.

Once, you stared at a room full of a children and their marked father, the no-witness rule locking up your mind and your trigger finger, and you never once hesitated in your resolve. You became a person that needed to die so that others wouldn't.

4.

You never believed in death. You believed that death wasn't about the dead; it was about what or who was left behind, the never-to-be would-be's of a life that was important enough to kill. You believed in grief.

You never believed that you would be left behind. People like you aren't left behind: you die or you continue living, invisibly, until you die.

You never believed in death, until Marie died. You had seen, finally, what it meant to live and what it meant to die. You felt, finally, what it meant to be the one left behind. You understood, finally, the unremembered but always – fucking _always_ - present horribleness inside of you that made you capable and competent.

You can't say that you hadn't sensed the oncoming storm when you were chasing it.

5.

You run. You remember, and you run.

Bourne and David are back; it's the easiest way to think of it. You, David, and Bourne: three mindsets working against each other, your time as an amnesiac tempering the other two the way Bourne tempered you for three years.

Bourne doesn't want to run; that instinct is gone for him. Just gone, like when he retreated into the Mediterranean and went head-first into below freezing water with two bullets in his back.

In the moments you have to process the memories, you aren't convinced that you've done the right thing. You aren't convinced that you _could_ have done the right thing. You know what it meant, finally, when you were told to look at you've given.

You run and you fall, bullet in the back to make a clean four.

The myth about you will say that you never lost - even when they think they killed you - but you'll know that you lost the entire fucking game when you said "yes," all of those years ago, even when you won this night.

-end

llethe / February, 2012  
>llethee (at) gmail (dot) com<p> 


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